[Suggestion] Buff muzzle velocities for ALL weapons

Yes, I mean increasing the muzzle velocity for every single weapon, for all 3 factions. Even the vehicle weapons. Sniper rifles in particular are in dire need of increased muzzle velocity; reliably headshotting a target at 500 meters or higher, is almost impossible if the target is moving. And half-decent players never stop moving around.

To even score reliable headshots on moving targets, even with the highest velocity bolt-action sniper rifles, you typically have to get within 200 meters, often even closer. But at that distance, you may as well just switch to a class with automatic weapons, since your targets can easily kill you when you're that close.

But even with the so-called 'long range' carbines, LMGs and assault rifles, their sluggish velocities make hitting things further than 250 meters less than viable, forcing you to get closer.

Like, come on; the continents in this game are huge. Why shouldn't we be able to reliably hit our targets at much greater distances?

Just gonna point out, the velocities in game, with the exception of vehicle rounds, are quite fast already. And semi realistic oddly enough.

For infantry combat, the velocities are arguably fine where they are. With the exception of snipers, the typical engagement range is usually less then 100 meters, and in numerous cases, less then 50 meters. Snipers could be argued as needing a buff ( I don't deny there is room to take such an argument), but for experienced snipers, the velocity doesn't seem to mean much.

Vehicles, on the other hand, have to have their velocity limited. Between render distances and terrain design, I think the longest engagement range that can actually be expected to occur is a little under a kilometer for a ground vehicle. Considering the distance, the velocity is generally acceptable, as it is scaled to real world ( max real world is about 4 km, so a roughly 1/2 to 1/4 scaling compared to real world is considered acceptable).

Define 'quite fast'. Because if it takes almost a full second to hit a target at 100 meters, then that's not 'fast'. Close quarters is forced due to both low velocities, and because the capture objectives (control points) are typically indoors. Being unable to hit things at range reliably, in my experience, tends to make it mandatory to either redeploy to the next fight, or to take a vehicle or aircraft to get somewhere faster.

The velocity buffs could be dependent on weapon class, if that's what it took to make it 'fair'. Maybe vehicle guns and AV launchers, get less of an increase compared to the standard firearms.

I absolutely agree with OP. With a muzzle velocity of 550m/s at 50m you can't even get a body shot without leading them. Yeah that's ridiculous. Lets say they are moving at 2m/s. At 50m that would give you 0.091s so they'd move 0.19m which is about 8inches. That means if you target they're body it should be an 80-90% hit and if you target their head it should be a 40-50% hit about.

But when I was testing it I found that I could not even shoot their bodies without leading them. I understand that your own movement should create greater instability to create a less accurate shot. But their movement shouldn't be reducing our accuracy at all. If we shoot them we shoot them but this game actually does some weird calculations based on their movement.

Also, this game is unrealistic in the movement from the beginning. Just because you spin your mouse a lot doesn't mean your whole body is able to spin or turn at rapid pace. This would slow you down. But people are able to manipulate their mouse and create a spastic style run that is nearly impossible to hit. None of that is realistic. If the mouse is turned it should not turn their body until they've gone past 90 degrees or even more if that's what it takes to make more realistic motion from the scope side.

All you have to do is grade out the run speed with respect to how much you turn the mouse. A great turn of the body will slow you down just like in real life. This will make the Athlete implant that much more valuable where it could decrease your deceleration whenever you are running.

Render ranges. Arma 3 has realistic ballistics because they have realistic engagement ranges. Planetside 2 has infantry that don't render past a few hundred meters, so ballistics need to scale accordingly.

Snipers engage at 200-300 instead of 800-1,000, so basic infantry rifles shouldn't be effective against point targets past 50-100.

In that context, things are about right.

Where I do think things are wonky, is how twitchy targets are in this game, doubly so when lag is introduced. The only argument I can see for cranking up bullet velocities is do to everyone going in to a ADADAD crouch jump spasm when they get shot at. Upping bullet velocity is a band aid, but adding inertia to movement and possibly some sort of stamina is the solution.

Agreed. Engagement ranges are limited in PS2 by damage drop off, velocity, and bullet drop. Of those three, velocity was least affected.

For the record, if it were up to me, only the sniper rifles would be getting muzzle velocity buffs. But if I made that suggestion, I'm certain people would instantly scream foul, and cry about not turning this game into 'Sniperside 2'.

Less chance of that happening, if I suggest that everything gets that sort of buff from the get-go.

I think that you shouldn't want to have such an easy game tailored and pandered to you. You might as well ask for hitscan and be done with it.

At 200m you are quite far away, especially considering the speed of infantry. If you fail at shooting enemies holding automatics before they get within a good range of you then the fault is yours, not theirs. The current velocities keep it far more interesting, as someone with an automatic actually has a chance to reach you before you absolutely murder them but it's far from a done deal regardless of who you play as.

Also this game has rendering limits. While it is possible for infantry to render beyond 300m, the standard for most players will be 300m and no more.
And lastly: Velocity determines range. If we halved the projectile velocities we would have more or less halved the effective ranges of most weapons. This makes long range longer and more challenging. Increasing that velociity would only make long range shorter, which is what you want. But why would you want that? Just because you can see someone you want to be able to shoot them? That's boring and bad gameplay! Good gameplay asks you to move, to pick a spot based on it's range to the target, and if you want to be safer you have to put more distance and make your shots harder, that's a good amount of choices to influence your sniping gameplay. If snipers truly got so badly designed that you can simply sit anywhere and take effective shots at 500m targets it would suck balls! Only someone who wants to have cheap farming would want something like that.

The slowest sniper rifle velocity I could find was 500m/s, that means 100m is covered in 0,2 seconds or 1/5th of a second. You are suffering from a bias that increases things 5x more than reality right there which already indicates why your idea of increasing velocities isn't going to be a good idea.

Close quarters is determined by the velocity and accuracy of your weapons, not by what you can see. I understand you come from games where what you see is what you can shoot but that is not PS2 and with the way the game is set up it shouldn't be PS2. You aren't forced into such ranges just like you aren't forced to spawn and walk to meet an enemy, it's just a part of the game's setup and mechanics.

And that's bad because...? You don't need to redeploy anyway, walk there or use the cheap cheap Flash that gives you stealth to boot if you are a sniper. Also complaining about having to travel in a game designed for large-scale combat is like complaining about having to kill things in an RPG.

Allright, how about a buff of 0% until we have a better argument than "I want to shoot something effectively because I can see it".

because first seen first kill is boring
the game has as mentioned already renderlimits considering how many people tend to run around
also increasing muzzlevelocity on ALL weapons would mean infantry against vehicles would have an even harder time to reach them ..
like seriously your suggestion would make the game so NO ONE would want to go out but stay in basefights ..

This I could agree with given certain stipulations. Vehicle weapon velocities are kind of a joke.

Snipers are in no need of a buff, sorry. As they sit right now they are kept from being overpowered by a very high skill gate where ~90% of players can't use them to their potential. Making them easier to hit with will only bring that skill gap down.

Headshot or not, you cannot kill a target at over 300m anyways this isn't really an issue. One of the first things I and many others on the site will tell a person who comes in here complaining about snipers is to always move. Hitting moving targets is hard and it should be hard. Dealing with moving targets is something that must either be done via aiming skill or just switching targets.

One of the challenges of sniping in this game is finding the "sweet spot" range at which you can still hit targets reliably without exposing yourself too much to return fire. The way that you achieve this can vary depending on your playstyle and skill level.
The reduced effective range of sniper rifles in this game is every bit as much of a balancing mechanic as the scope glint was in the newer Battlefield games: Yes, you can be incredibly difficult to detect and play very safely but if you want to be effective you are going to have to get stuck in and put yourself at risk.

No.

It two parts:
For non sniper weapons it's fine. The need to slightly lead a moving target is a challenging mechanic that adds fun to the game.

For sniping weapons the "no" is absolute and here is why: If you stand still in this game you're going to get sniped. You must move and throw some shuffle into motion to avoid a nice straight line. Make the sniper avoid you and pick the easy target.

If you buff velocities all bets are off. There will be no defense against snipers and the game will collapse into a flood of people switching to infiltrator.


Sorry, just disagree.

To be fair, i felt like this a long time ago too... If you come from games that have "hitscan" weapons, then this takes some getting used to.
Still if you compare other arcade based shooters with a ballistic bullet system, then all have similar slow bullet speeds. (I said arcade because games like arma are clearly more towards simulation than "action")

There is a number of problems here with your request:

The game Engine wasn't build for high ranges and up to this day has problems within its netcode when too many objects have to be synced.
This is why only targets that are valid for your targeting are synced with your client at all.
All others are simply dropped and "not there".
(Of course this causes problems sometimes too, like invisible phalanx turrets that just won't render despite them already shooting your tank.
Or a volley of lolpod rockets that don't do any damage to anyone, despite you knowing that there where enemies, but the game not syncing them fast enough.)
This alone is reason enough to deny your request.
It took the devs years to find the sweet spot for syncing enemy players.
I doubt they can improve it further running within the same engine.

Rendering players past 300 meters causes problems in the graphics engine and is causing shadows to glitch player models. So guess what they did, they turned the reder distance down based on weapons type. (And number of players.)
This causes some weird things too, like being in a 300+ player fight and when snping only getting snipers to render, because those snipers get rendering priority by the sytem and because there are "a lot" of snipers in the area, you hit the maxium cap for rendering infantry players at sniping range.

Apart from the technical reasons, there are gameplay reasons too. Just because you don't think it is easy enough to snipe, doesn't mean that it is still the most easy class to go on a killing spree as infantry in this game...
Really if anything sniping is too easy, not only because if 1-hit bolt action snipers, but because of the ability to cloak as a sniper too.
If you ask me, it should be a lot harder.

Really try to achieve a 20 killstreak with a sniper and for comparison close range shotgun, both deadly, but the high range gives you a good amout of safety from a lot of weapons (like shotguns).

The only advice i can give you is to adapt to be closer to the action. It is not the games fault that you are bad at sniping the way you want it to work just won't work.
Please consider there are other classes too that want to have at least a chance to retaliate and i assure you a good sniper still can hit moving targets.

The last thing we need is more snipers in the game. Or MORE sniper rifle buffs.

No thx...

There are already far too many hilltop snipers already contributing very little to the game. Nothing more cancerous than the body shotting semi auto spamming at you from unknown ranges, causing you to have to pause the fighting constantly. Gameplay quality dropped significantly after they received that most recent buff.

I hate never being able to hold still (or even slow down) on top of a building (or any semi open area even) for instance as LA to recharge or line up a shot because of the undoubted ~5-10 ****** snipers just sitting waaaay outside the base waiting to shoot until someone is holding still. The 10 cert/hr type of sniper....

I am not advocating towards it, because a significant amount of players enjoy that type of gameplay apparently, but I 100% think the game would be better for most players without long range sniper rifles. I miss the days when you could take a AR like the SABR 13 and "outsnipe" snipers with it at extreme ranges even. Much harder/less possible now.

As a potential counter for that sort of thing, I'd love for some sort of "counter sniper" scope/attachment to be implemented that made infiltrator camo over long distances much more detectable. Possibly a infrared highlight (even while cloaked) for ~3 secs after a shot. There is not enough counter sniping going on to begin with.

The idea, of course, is that all guns would get a velocity buff. Because only buffing sniper rifles would not sit well with everyone else, despite what I happen to want. You know, the difference between what I want, and what's actually 'fair'.

Increasing the velocity on every single gun (that includes LMGs, carbines, assault rifles, pistols, etc), would improve the effective ranges on all forms of combat. Yes, I understand that there are render limits, but still.

Also, for record, even when I do camp outside of a base, I make sure I have the Ammo Printer implant equipped before I get into position, so I can keep shooting Recon Darts right into the base. And when I'm on top of a really big hill, I can basically shoot a dart anywhere. I'd like to think that it helps friendly forces a bit, when I can light up an entire base with properly spaced sensor darts.

What? Not enough counter sniping? The counter to a sniper is a sniper. You're making the mistake of asking too much to nerf snipers as you are arguing the OP is asking too much to buff them.

The whole point of a sniper is to snipe long range. If you don't let them do that with accurate muzzle velocities then yeah it's going to bring your cert/hour down. And so let's just talk about that now for a minute. It's obvious that so many people have a bias against snipers just because the death comes out of nowhere and it comes from far away. But that is the whole point of the sniper. What's the average cert/hour of all classes for all characters in the game? I bet you the heavy assault is number 1, the medic and then the engineer and the light assault come closely after. But the sniper? The sniper is the least rewarding class in the game. So that should tell you that this class has already been nerfed to the ground.

What you are really complaining about is the cloaking. The fact that snipers have that at all is a huge risk that Planetside has taken. Why don't we take the cloaking out completely and just give the snipers their true ability to snipe? It's like the game is playing a dangerous balance by giving snipers the ability to cloak because now they need to be close enough to be countered by other enemies.

The fact they called a sniper class the "infiltrator" just shows you how confused this game is. Cloaking is inherently backwards to what a sniper is supposed to function as in combat. Snipers are anything but an infiltrator. That should be the name of the Light Assault. But I've seen players mention this very idea of splitting the sniper into two classes: one with cloak and the other with sniper because they contradict their own function.

Stated velocities are in the 300 to 700 meters per second range, which is certainly fast. And based on personal experience, I have rarely had to deal with a 1 second lead time, and never against a target at 100 meters ( only times I have had to usually involved suppressed sniper shots). Granted, I tend to stick to higher velocity weapons, since I do prefer the reduced lead timing.

To my knowledge, the only weapon in the game that comes close to a 100m/s velocity ( the value needed to achieve that sort of a timing feet), is the hunter QCX.

If there is some sort of natural velocity decay mechanic in game, I don't know of it.

Nvidia is dropping support for dx9 in a couple months. So there might be some hope of a dx11 update.

I would not mind that sort of change at all, if it also meant getting all muzzle velocities buffed.

If I can more effectively shoot from much further away, then who needs cloaking?

Edit: And it would be interesting to see what sort of new weapons would be unique to whatever new class would theoretically inherit the cloaking ability.

Probably spy and sniper. Personally, I think cloaking goes well with sniping, as it allows you to get somewhere where you can snipe without getting shot, thus nearly eliminating any chance getting killed while basically taking a scenic walk/climb. This allows snipers to counter snipe those who already have a nice spot to some extent, but it also makes it harder to counter snipe as well since they can also cloak.